Clarifying Massive Protostellar Evolution and Circumstellar Processing

Details Clarifying Massive Protostellar Evolution and Circumstellar Processing Clarifying Massive Protostellar Evolution and Circumstellar Processing

Mar 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008sptz.prop50563i&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #50563

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Scientific paper

Massive stars dominate the evolution of galaxies and even as protostars, their feedback can affect their own formation and that of their host clusters. We propose a systematic study of massive protostars through the stages of their early evolution, to derive a clearer evolutionary sequence and a better link between the state of the central source and physical conditions in circumstellar material. This experiment will improve over existing work by careful source selection to systematically span evolutionary parameter space, resulting in a more uniform and comprehensive sample. Sophisticated radiative transfer, ionization, and chemical modeling will be used to extract the full riches of each IRS spectrum and find trends in how massive stars form and process their natal material: We will be able to determine the temperature, density, and chemical state (heating history) of circumstellar dust and ice in the accretion disk and envelope, and at later evolutionary stages the ionizing and soft (PAH-exciting) ultraviolet radiation emitted by the protostars and how that radiation is quenched and shadowed by circumstellar material. This investigation is the key to realizing the full potential of previous infrared imaging surveys like MSX and Spitzer's GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL to study massive star formation. These surveys have provided a basis for us to select a large relatively unbiased sample spanning evolutionary state. In return, revealing the spectroscopic signature of massive YSOs will greatly clarify the modeling and interpretation of the thousands of other protostars in these imaging survey data.

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